Like it or not, there's far more to knowledge management than putting up portals and document repositories and then letting users search content – even if you have a pinpoint-accurate search engine. According to research firm Gartner, within five years more than 75 percent of new search engines will include a social search element for better relevancy. After previewing Vivísimo Velocity 6.0, it's clear to me tha Like it or not, there’s far more to knowledge management than putting up portals and document repositories and then letting users search content – even if you have a pinpoint-accurate search engine. According to research firm Gartner, within five years more than 75 percent of new search engines will include a social search element for better relevancy. After previewing Vivísimo Velocity 6.0, it’s clear to me that the product’s social features not only harness human knowledge to boost result accuracy, but introduce a whole new level of collaboration with content mashups and other Web 2.0 functions.[ See also: InfoWorld Technology of the Year Awards Data Management winners ]Velocity’s consistently been on the forward edge of enterprise search with clustered results. Version 6.0 maintains this innate philosophy, though the user interface has a more polished feel. Yet it didn’t take much time for me to spot the most important changes in the results pane. First, users can vote whether they find a search result useful or not – and also rate search results. (You can ensure that the process doesn’t get out of hand; for example, administrators can specify that only votes from experts count.) Velocity then uses this combined information to adjust relevancy of results in real time. In much the same way, users tag documents that appear in their results with keywords, and Velocity immediately adds this metadata to the index. Other employees then have the option to refine results by these tags.What’s interesting, though, is how you can enrich search results by adding your own comments. Just like a blog, workers strike up conversations about content right in the search interface. I see this feature cutting the number of documents that are e-mailed for review and also reducing the need for separate wiki and blog applications.Many search engines let you save results for personal use. Still, I found Velocity 6.0’s new shared folders a valuable extension to this process. Simple examples might be a librarian doing preemptive research for news reporters on a breaking story or to assist those in a marketing department preparing a bid, and then saving the results for your staff to access. Perhaps the most intriguing addition to Velocity 6.0 is the way searches can uncover experts within organizations. Again, you can find applications on the market that scrape e-mail and IM conversations, say, to discover expertise. Velocity does much the same by developing profiles of experts based on tags and data in different repositories. But it presents automatic mash-ups of pictures, contact information, documents the person authored, and tags – something most expert software lacks.Finally, Vivísimo Velocity 6.0 now includes an executive dashboard of hot topics, which can be segmented by groups. More than a toy, I believe, this could provide valuable insight into the type of intelligence residing within an organization. Vivísimo Velocity, with clustering and easy administration, has always been about productivity. While that’s unchanged, I think the social aspects of this version make it the first enterprise search product to both make use of human knowledge and to deepen it. Vivísimo Velocity 6.0 Availability: November 2007 Pricing: Starts at $25,000 Verdict: Vivísimo Velocity 6.0 extends its acknowledged easy search interface and ability to crawl enterprise repositories with social tagging, bookmarking, and networking. Voting and ratings improve search accuracy, while tagging provides another way to filter results. Searches can be annotated with comments for increased collaboration. And Velocity delivers employee data from disparate sources as enterprise mash-ups. Technology Industry